We watch TV so you don't have to. But you should. You really should.

When Victor Fleming’s incomparable musical “The Wizard of Oz” was released in 1939, it was a marvel of technical genius and a technicolor wonder that still enchants 78 years later. Today, the story seems so modest.

A Kansas girl next door gets picked up by a tornado and dropped in a kingdom where she must travel to a Wizard, with a merry band of eclectic sidekicks, to make her way home — and melts a wicked green witch with a bucket of water along the way.

So naturally, in today’s free-for-all TV climate, where innocence doesn’t sell as well as dark and violent, NBC has re-imagined the classic story that’s been retold and readapted more times than there are Munchkins. The resulting 10-hour series ”Emerald City” twists, darkens, deepens and ultimately hollows out Oz of what made it magical: it’s simplicity.… Read More »